Pickup noise from mounted humbucker

[Groyniad]

brand new double humbucker archtop

nearly perfect

but some noise from mounted hum buckers. almost none for a long time. then it starts.

trying to find the precise pickup height to stop the noises is a fools game.

i've put longer pickup springs in both hum buckers and added a second wider pickup spring for good measure.

very tricky operation - its hard to fit a longer than average pickup screw

but it helped

and then the noises started to come back

-----

i just wedged a d'andrea pro plec (small size) 1.5mm between the pickup itself and its black plastic mounting bracket on both pickups (along the shorter edge of the pickup on the side of the pick guard)

almost invisible - the coloring of the pick is perfect for the guitar - no visual issue

i now realize that the pickups were sort of making a bit of noise all the fugging time - and genuinely blocking the natural voice of the guitar. the effect is very striking indeed. the guitar both sounds and feels way better both acoustically and amplified - now that the pickups are totally silent.

i'm sure there are more elegant ways to totally stop the pickup vibrating in its housing - but oh my god you should not settle for anything less than TOTALLY SILENT mounted hum buckers on an archtop guitar.

i suppose i'm rejecting a widely held view that a certain amount of noise from mounted hum buckers on archtops is just an inevitable part of archtop life. it is not - and totally silent hum buckers make the whole guitar feel and sound significantly better.

[neatomic]

pull the metal springs and replace with rubber surgical tubing...that will still allow pickup height adjustment without any metalic klinking and vibration

classic old trick

cheers

[icr]

I have been chasing odd noises in hollow electric guitars for 20 years. Even when I find what sounds like a solution to silence, some note somewhere causes a new noise. I accept that there will be rattles and microphonic unless one goes without the bridge pickup (where most vibration exists) or goes to a floating pickup. I personally think that in the 70 years of mounting pickups directly to the top of an archtop, the odd sounds add to the favor whether they are audible or subliminal.

Like string squeaks. They are always there but mostly not noticeable. And if you are unfortunate to be bothered by them, you will never be satisfied

Having written all that, I do try to minimize the noise. For my new-to-me 2007 ES-175 I have placed pieces of foam rubber between the pickup bezel and the pickup.

[Groyniad]

well i can't help thinking that making it impossible for the pickup to move against the housing eradicates at least the family of noises and strange vibrations that i was getting.

(i've tried the tubing - but it deadened the sound of the guitar i tried it on too much. i was very struck by the effect. you could use it to take the bite out of a guitar that was too bright.)

part of what is so nice about silent pickups is that you suddenly get an even response across the whole guitar - instead of a response that varies dramatically according to how much pickup vibration happens to get generated at various pitches.

i think this is major musical stuff - way way way more significant that which amp or which guitar (within certain limits) you're using. you don't have to deal with any equivalent to this on other instruments. the noise corrupts the sound and the vibration corrupts the feel - and that's huge. you can't easily coax a musical response from an instrument that is randomly filling the tone it produces with a range of sounds that are both unpleasant and totally beyond your musical control.

if there was no cure for it because the top vibrates way too much into the pickup (or something) - you'd have to go for floating pickups. but i think there is a cure for it (as long as there aren't bigger problems with other aspects of the pickup/guitar.) adjust pickup height to taste and then totally immobilize the pickup.

[boatheelmusic]

There certainly must be better ways to make an electric guitar.

[icr]

There certainly must be better ways to make an electric guitar.

Well, yes there are....

[docbop]

There certainly must be better ways to make an electric guitar.

it's called a solid body guitar.


That's why I wish my 175 was a single pickup guitar the bridge pickup is a constant battle with rattles. Only my Benson its the pickguard that I have to keep a screw driver around to figure out what to tighten and what to loosen. Like it or not it's part of playing archtops and some are worse than others.

[fritz jones]

p90s dont rattle.

[Jabberwocky]

Hi Groyniad,

I believe you that surgical tubing killed the sound. The ears hear what the ears hear.

Have you tried a sliver of balsa or spruce to wedge the pickup against the ring? Another thought might be pure rag paper from the art shop, Fabriano or Arches. Or possibly, strips of real leather.

[neatomic]

I believe you that surgical tubing killed the sound. The ears hear what the ears hear.

actually i have sincere doubts about that...the source of tone ie the magnet to string remains exactly the same

the tubing vs spring merely removes any extraneous noise..not tone!!

there are a dozen other concerns that would have far greater impact ie string guage /type, pickup height etc etc

tubing vs spring around adj screw is major minutia...like saying there's a difference in tone between bakelite and modern plastic pickup risers..or that stainless steel pup height screws sound different from chrome..for dog ears only

i don't buy it

cheers

[Cunamara]

A dab of silicone sealant between the pickup ring and the pickup ought to do it and be invisible.

I bet that over at the Gear Page you can find a thread about the merits of modern versus vintage springs as they affect tone. The vintage spring steel sounded much better!

[hans halmackenreuter]

pull the metal springs and replace with rubber surgical tubing...that will still allow pickup height adjustment without any metalic klinking and vibration

classic old trick

cheers

My archtop rattled too and I decided to try the silicone tube too. My problem was solved by than.

[AlainJazz]

On both my main arch tops I stuck a really
small piece of an old black sock between the pickup and the ring. Did the trick. When Roger Sadowsky was servicing my JH, he chuckled and said something to the effect that it's an unavoidable problem and he liked my solution :-)

[DanielleOM]

I have used surgical gloves and cut them into strips and jammed them in between the pickup ring and the pickup. Also made sure I got a lot of it right up against the springs.

[JazzNote]

Ha, on the neck pickup of my L5 i've been using a piece of cardboard between the ring and the pickup cover, on the bridge pickup some rubber which is used to repair bicycle tubes. The rattle usually comes back again after some weeks, then i have to slightly move the position of the PU within the ring to get rid of it again. I'm still amazed by the fact that moving it just a tiny little bit makes the guitar sounding slightly different acoustically.

[GNAPPI]

It goes to show you that good ideas die on the vine. Schaller (4 mounting / adjustment screws) and Epiphone Genesis (3 mounting / adjustment screws) were a solution nobody emulated.

[neatomic]

original guild hb-1's had 3 screw adj as well




cheers

[vinlander]

Gibson at some point were using 4 mounting screws as present on their low impedance pickups on LP Signature guitars and basses from the early 70s

[gspirro1]

There certainly must be better ways to make an electric guitar.

Here's one


I had an annoying pickup rattle on my Eastman El Rey. A couple of wraps of electrical tape on the pup cover edge solved it nicely.

(BTW that guitar above was built by a Japanese artist/luthier, Michihiro Matsuda. There was a video posted and it sounded quite good! I love unique guitars! )

[Groyniad]

so sadowsky says its inevitable

well that's fine as long as he means that there's always going to be a problem with pickup noise and vibration - i can totally see that

but there absolutely has to be a solution - and a number of posts seem to confirm that there is.

there's a hell of a distance between finding the solution and playing a guitar without any additional musically meaningless noises - and giving up on finding a solution and trying to learn to cope

----

try the d'adaria pro plek 1.5mm teardrop pick on gibson classic 57s - if you've got a sunburst guitar they are the same colour and they seem to immobilize the pickup very well

i think the sylicon sealant will be the best and most elegant solution - can i trust a standard guitar tech with a job like that?

[Groyniad]

Ha, on the neck pickup of my L5 i've been using a piece of cardboard between the ring and the pickup cover, on the bridge pickup some rubber which is used to repair bicycle tubes. The rattle usually comes back again after some weeks, then i have to slightly move the position of the PU within the ring to get rid of it again. I'm still amazed by the fact that moving it just a tiny little bit makes the guitar sounding slightly different acoustically.

try the picks i'm recommending - they're much more rigid than cardboard or rubber and exactly the right size - and the dark tortoise-shell blends very well indeed - and they don't have to stick out above the pickup at all.

[Groyniad]

i've never had a chance to say this sort of thing but i do now!

well neatomic all i can say is that i've tried it and the effect was utterly obvious - unmistakeable. so its not a question of me buying anything but of my finding something to be so - something i am simply reporting on now.

every different set of pickup springs i tried made the guitar sound a bit different (an LS17) - but the difference between the springs and the rubber tubing was night and day. i was blown away - i could hardly believe something like that could make any difference at all never mind an utterly obvious one. i had to change back to springs within a few hours and the normal response of the guitar returned immediately.

as i say - the effect could be very useful if you wanted to take the edge off an over-bright archtop.

in the end i found springs that were long enough and they totally immobilized the pickup and totally solved the problem.

couldn't find springs long enough to do that on my new archtop - but the plectrum-wedge has worked perfectly. i'll be a monkey's banana if the same noises come back after a few weeks.

[lawson-stone]

It seems to me almost scandalous that a person could spend $6000-$8000 on arguably the finest guitar on earth and be reduced to cramming picks into the pickup mounting ring. I'm not knocking the L5CES, wish I had one, but gosh, that just seems to me … wrong.

[Bezoeker]

In my opinion the best solution is to get a sheet of the thin (maybe 2mm or so) back eva foam they sell at Michaels and a roll of low quality carpet tape - the kind not on a fabric base.

For a single player this will be a lifetime supply of the solution.

The black foam is all but invisible between the PU and the bezel.

Use the tape to stick it to the PU cover after you set the height, so you know where the foam needs to go. Use it on both long edges.

100% agreed that the Gibson PU bezel (like acrylic press-on speed knobs) are appalling crap. But we seem to love our traditional appalling crap over better solutions like a three point PU suspension which offers two big benefits.

Go figure.

[GNAPPI]

We could always fill the guitars up with this :-) Once it oozed out the F holes, problem gone.